hand, in those pleasant and comprehensive volumes which are still to this day the great storehouse of materials for Cicero’s biography, is as blind to his faults as though he were himself delivering a panegyric in the Rostra at Rome.  Perhaps it is the partiality of the learned bishop’s view which has produced a reaction in the minds of sceptical German scholars, and of some modern writers of our own.  It is impossible not to sympathise in some degree with that Athenian who was tired of always hearing Aristides extolled as “the Just;” and there was certainly a strong temptation to critics to pick holes in a man’s character who was perpetually, during his lifetime and for eighteen centuries after his death, having a trumpet sounded before him to announce him as the prince of patriots as well as philosophers; worthy indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church, but for the single drawback of his not having been a Christian.

On one point some of his eulogists seem manifestly unfair.  They say that the circumstances under which we form our judgment of the man are exceptional in this—­that we happen to possess in his case all this mass of private and confidential letters (there are nearly eight hundred of his own which have come down to us), giving us an insight into his private motives, his secret jealousies, and hopes, and fears, and ambitions, of which in the case of other men we have no such revelation.  It is quite true; but his advocates forget that it is from the very same pages which reveal his weaknesses, that they draw their real knowledge of many of those characteristics which they most admire—­his sincere love for his country, his kindness of heart, his amiability in all his domestic relations.  It is true that we cannot look into the private letters of Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we can into Cicero’s; but it is not so certain that if we could, our estimate of their characters would be lowered.  We might discover, in their cases as in his, many traces of what seems insincerity, timidity, a desire to sail with the stream; we might find that the views which they expressed in public were not always those which they entertained in private; but we might also find an inner current of kindness, and benevolence, and tenderness of heart, for which the world gives them little credit.  One enthusiastic advocate, Wieland, goes so far as to wish that this kind of evidence could, in the case of such a man as Cicero, have been “cooked”, to use a modern phrase:  that we could have had only a judicious selection from this too truthful mass, of correspondence; that his secretary, Tiro, or some judicious friend, had destroyed the whole packet of letters in which the great Roman bemoaned himself, during his exile from Rome, to his wife, to his brother, and to Atticus.  The partisan method of writing history, though often practised, has seldom been so boldly professed.